Wednesday, 11 October, 2023

Anomalous Collective Dynamics of Autochemotactic Populations

J. van der Kolk, F. Raßhofer, R. Swiderski, A. Haldar, A. Basu, E. Frey

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.088201

While the role of local interactions in nonequilibrium phase transitions is well studied, a fundamental understanding of the effects of long-range interactions is lacking. We study the critical dynamics of reproducing agents subject to autochemotactic interactions and limited resources. A renormalization group analysis reveals distinct scaling regimes for fast (attractive or repulsive) interactions; for slow signal transduction, the dynamics is dominated by a diffusive fixed point. Furthermore, we present a correction to the Keller-Segel nonlinearity emerging close to the extinction threshold and a novel nonlinear mechanism that stabilizes the continuous transition against the emergence of a characteristic length scale due to a chemotactic collapse.